Lawton introduced the idea of
Rational Spirituality in
The Book of the Soul (RS Press, 2004). This was hailed as “masterly and scholarly” and “a book that intellectuals need not be ashamed of having on their shelves”.
Describing Rational Spirituality as an approach that for the first time relies exclusively on “evidence not faith”, Lawton has also written about this worldview in a variety of journals. He uses three main areas of evidence for its foundations:
- Research into near-death experiences, to prove the concept of the separate soul.
- Research into children who remember past lives spontaneously, as pioneered by Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia.
- Research into past-life regression, especially by the pioneering Australian psychologist Peter Ramster.
The latter two areas support the idea of reincarnation, and in all three Lawton concentrates on cases involving what he refers to as “obscure and verifiable evidence”.
His other main contribution in
The Book of the Soul was to bring together all the research into regression into the time “between lives”, or “interlife” as he called it. This was conducted by pioneers like Joel Whitton, Helen Wambach, Peter Ramster, Edith Fiore and Michael Newton. Lawton demonstrated the high level of consistency in the results obtained by these pioneers, and argued that this could not be explained by them working together, or by their subjects themselves having prior knowledge of work that was then very little known.
In 2007 Lawton produced a highly simplified version of his spiritual research in
The Little Book of the Soul.